In P L A C E, Graham explores the ways in which our imagination, intuition, and experience—increasingly devalued by a culture that regards them as “mere” subjectivity—aid us in navigating a world moving blindly towards its own annihilation and a political reality where the human person and its dignity are increasingly disposable.
Throughout, Graham seeks out sites of wakeful resistance and achieved presence. From the natural world to human sensation, the poems test the unstable congeries of the self, and the creative tensions that exist within and between our inner and outer landscapes—particularly as these are shaped by language.
Beginning with a poem dated June 5th, placed on Omaha Beach, in Normandy—the anniversary of the day before the “historical” events of June 6th—P L A C E is made up of meditations written in a uneasy lull before an unknowable, potentially drastic change—meditations which enact and explore the role of the human in and on nature. In these poems, all time lived is felt to be both incipient, and already posthumous.
This is not the same as preparing for a death. It is preparing for a life we know we, and our offspring, shall have no choice but to live. How does one think ethically as well as emotionally in such a predicament? How does one think of one’s child—of having brought a person into this condition? How does love continue, and how is it supposed to be transmitted? Does the nature of love change?
Both formally and thematically these are poems of ec(h)o-location in space/time. They work to discern “aftermath” from “future”—as the two margins of the form ask us to feel the vertiginous “double” position in which we find ourselves, constantly looking back just as we are forced to try to see ahead.
In an era where distrust of human experience and its attendant accountability are pervasive P L A C E calls us, in poems of unusual force and beauty, to re-inhabit and make full use of—and even rejoice in—a more responsive and responsible place of the human in the world.